The Absolutely Stunning Naïveté of the Left's Useful Infidels

'I guess since you can never get the liberal trolls to discuss the Middle East, they must be down with obama’s interventions and are supportive of the atrocities committed by The Free Syrian Army terrorists.It’s good to know where they stand.'

- hawkdriver on July 2, 2014 at 12:02 AM

I’ll give you two examples from Norway of how the Western Left has native pawns and apologists for Islamists taken from a piece that I wrote on Norwegian antisemitism and multiculturalism several years ago:

First, homosexuality…

The leftist Norwegian Labour government’s Ministry of Children, Equality, and Social Inclusion named Mahdi Hassan, a noted homophobe, as the 2009 Role Model of the Year. He looks like a very nice chap. Of course, Mein Kampf probably looked like a good book in Germany in the 1920s judging by the cover.

Mahdi Hassan with Anniken Huitfeldt, former Minister of Children and Equality, 2009

Hassan told the newspaper Arbeidets Rett that he wants a ban on homosexuality, based on the Qur’an. Does he support the death penalty for gays? That’s ‘up to each individual country to decide, but, in general, yes.’

Was he condemned? Needless to say, the homosexual community wasn’t thrilled, but other than that he was cheered with the Socialists applauding loudly.

‘There is freedom of speech in Norway and in the Tynset Socialist Left Party we consider it unproblematic that Mahdi is opposed in principle to homosexuality. It is in accordance with his religion.’

- Stein Petter Løkken, leader of the Socialist Left Party in Hassan’s home kommune of Tynset

In November 2007 during an Oslo debate, at which the deputy chairman of Norway’s Islamic Council, Asghar Ali, was asked if he would refuse to reject the death penalty for gays. He refused. The head of the Islamic Council, which represents 80,000 Muslims), Senaid Kobilica was asked where he stood on the question, he responded that he couldn’t possibly give a definitive answer ‘until he got a ruling from the European Fatwa Council, but that homosexuality was against the teachings of the Qur’an and execution is the proscribed punishment.’

If it makes you feel any better, Kobilica did say that he was ‘100 per cent certain that the Council will not come out in favour of something which conflicts with European law.’ By which he means, that while the death penalty for homosexuals is, indeed, an orthodox Islamic position — one about which the Fatwa Council’s head, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, has himself written sympathetically — Western Muslim leaders, in accordance with the Qur'an, prefer in such controversial cases not to challenge infidel law…for now.

‘It isn’t possible to live homosexually and at the same time say that one practices Islam. These are two incompatible things… Homosexuality goes against what Islam stands for, and therefore it can’t be combined.’

– Senaid Kobilica

After the brouhaha in 2007, it emerged that Asghar Ali not only was deputy chairman of the Islamic Council, but was also on the board of the Oslo Arbeidersamfunn, the largest and most influential association within Norway’s ruling Labour Party. As Bruce Bawer reported, when asked about Ali’s views, the head of the Oslo Arbeidersamfunn, Anne Cathrine Berger, lamented that some people ‘can’t see the difference between a board member’s views and the organisation’s views.’ Despite scattered calls for his dismissal, Ali remained on the board.

Recently, a gay couple was attacked for holding hands; they were told that gays were not welcome because the area in which they were walking in was ‘Muslim territory.’ On another occasion, a gay couple was ejected from a kebab restaurant because they were kissing. These as well as other incidents led to a debate in the major newspapers about the existence of morality police, who strove to obtain social control based on Islamic values in multi-ethnic communities.

Kaltham Lie, who was tortured for his sexual orientation by Saddam Hussein and fled Iraq for Norway in 1992, says that it was too difficult to go to the mosque. As Norway’s first openly gay Muslim, he now stays away from the Muslim community, especially in Oslo. ‘It’s very important for me to be open and not to try to hide. Somebody must stand up for the world to advance. ‘Oslo can be difficult, but we he also a lot of positive things, even in Grønland.’

He attends a Christian church with his new husband, Knut Asprusten. ‘[H]e was with me in church. Even if we have different religions, we both believe in an open God. It doesn’t cause us any problems,’ said Asprusten.

In a country of 5 million people, where only 3% of the population is Muslim, there is only one openly Muslim lesbian: Sara Azmeh Rasmussen.

Sara Azmeh Rasmussen

Second, women, attire, and rape…

If the Islamists position on homosexuality isn’t enough to make the Left consider with whom they are in bed, perhaps, Eva Helgetun might be, as she was emblematic of the terror that Norwegian women face.

'According to many of the rape victims, their rapists told them that their religion allowed them to rape non-Muslims.’

Islam is called the ‘religion of peace’ by its adherents and defenders, but many Norwegian women are learning that Islam, as practised by many there, is the religion of rape.

According to an incredible police report released in June, every violent rape in Norway in the past 5 years, where the rapist could be identified, was committed by a male of non-western background and every solved rape in 2010 was committed by a Muslim (here, here, here, here, here, here, here). This phenomenon is not new in Scandinavia. The reported number of rapes in the Norwegian capital of Oslo is six times as high as in New York City.

A report in Aftenposten in 2001 said:

‘While 65% of those charged with rape are classed as coming from a non-western background, this segment makes up only 14.3% of Oslo’s population. Norwegian women were the victims in 80% of the cases.'

In 2005, a crime prevention study released in Sweden reported that Algerians, Libyans, Moroccans, and Tunisians ‘dominate the group of rape suspects. The same year, the newspaper Aftonbladet reported that nearly half of all rapists were immigrants.

As was observed, ‘in other words, Muslims from Africa and other benighted Third World places are targeting Western women for rape.’

Ms Unni Wikan, a professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo, said:

‘Norwegian women must take their share of responsibility for these rapes’ because Muslim men found their manner of dress provocative. [Her conclusion was not that Muslim men living in the West needed to adjust to Western norms, but the exact opposite] Norwegian women must realise that we live in a Multicultural society and adapt themselves to it.’

'Feminist' Unni Wikan

That brings us back to Eva Helgetun, a 14 year-old girl, who was gang raped on 1 May 2011 by 3 Somali Muslims in Trondheim, a beautiful area with a population of approximately 174,000. Her’s was the fifth gang rape perpetrated by Muslims in Trondheim in a month. Traumatised, battered, and unable to cope, this beautiful, young girl committed suicide on 28 May 2011. In Shari’ah law, a rape victim must have four witnesses; otherwise, she is the adulterer. In Unni Wikan’s world, Eva Helgetun ‘asked for it’ simply by being an exquisite girl in Western clothes and, I suppose, did what any ‘guilty, wanton, adulterous’ dhimmi should: She killed herself.

Eva Helgetun, RIP

'That was insightful. And a facepalm about political bed-fellows I will never understand. Progressive gays seem hell bent on destroying organized Christianity. They do this dance with the devil, radical Islam, to facilitate that. And in the mean time they ignore the fact the execution they claim will never really take place, are currently taking place in Iran.But obama has managed to make Iran look like the peace makers and fighters of terrorism on the world stage much like he has for Putin and Russia.How the hell did we get this turned around?'

- hawkdriver on July 2, 2014 at 12:27 AM

It truly is FUBAR’d. Consider this from Bruce Bawer, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center and the author of ‘While Europe Slept,’ ‘Surrender’, ‘The Victims’ Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind’, and ‘The New Quislings’, about the Norwegian Left’s exploitation of the July 22 Massacre of 77 people by Anders Behring Breivik, who observed in his article, ‘The Poison of Multiculturalism’:

If you want a pretty good example of just why multiculturalism is so poisonous, here’s one for you.

I live in Norway. Here, as elsewhere in Europe, there reside innumerable immigrants from the Muslim world who despise Western values, reject sexual equality, and affirm primitive patriarchal codes and concepts of ‘honor’ that condemn people (mostly females) to death for infractions that neither you nor I would even recognize as infractions. Nonetheless these individuals enjoy Norwegian residency, and in some cases Norwegian citizenship, which some of them were granted because they claimed asylum (most likely on specious grounds, as demonstrated by the fact that many, if not most, of them return regularly to the countries from which they supposedly ‘fled’), and which others were granted because they married Norwegian residents (usually their own cousins, whom they married for no other reason than to acquire Western residency).

Every now and then there come along people from the Muslim world who are legitimate asylum-seekers – people who really would be in danger if they returned to their homelands, people to whom Western countries should feel a moral obligation to grant residency, and people from whose presence those countries would actually benefit, precisely because they’re people who will appreciate freedom more than most of the rest of us do. To put it another way, they’re the kind of immigrants who, generation by generation, have renewed the American spirit and the American dream by reminding those of us whose ancestors preceded them just how precious a thing freedom is.

Meet ‘Azad.’ He’s a gay Iraqi who, according to an article at the website of NRK, the Norwegian national broadcasting system, has been in a committed relationship since 2006 with somebody named Odd Arne Henriksen. (I don’t know either of these guys, though my partner, after looking at the picture of the two of them that accompanies the article, says he’s seen Henriksen around town a number of times. Oslo is a pretty small city.)

For years, apparently, ‘Azad’ has lived in Norway without causing any problems or being a burden on the state. But now an appellate court has ordered that he be deported to Iraq. If he goes back there, he says, ‘My clan will kill me.’ Indeed, the court recognizes that if it becomes known in Iraq that ‘Azad’ is gay, he risks ‘exclusion, isolation, and physical punishment.’ (In fact, he risks much worse.) Nonetheless the court has ruled that ‘Azad,’ in the words of NRK’s report, ‘must comply with his homeland’s sociocultural norms.’

Let me repeat that: HE ‘MUST COMPLY WITH HIS HOMELAND’S SOCIOCULTURAL NORMS.’

Forget freedom. Forget Norway’s sociocultural norms. Forget the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In making a decision that for ‘Azad’ may mean the difference between life and death, what matters to an appellate court in Norway – a Western European country, a member of NATO – is ‘his homeland’s sociocultural norms’…however brutal and primitive those ‘norms’ may be. NRK notes that ‘Azad’ is far from alone. In the past two years, Norway has turned down no fewer than forty of fifty-two gay asylum seekers. The records of many other Western countries are not much better.

In the case of Norway, however, such statistics are especially outrageous…for this is a country that likes to think of itself as being extremely gay-friendly. It was the second country in the world to recognize same-sex partnerships. It was the sixth to recognize gay marriages. When it comes to native Norwegians who happen to be gay, the Norwegian state is very clear about where it stands on the rights and dignity of gay people. Gay Norwegians deserve no less than every right granted straight Norwegians, up to and including the right to marry.

But when it comes to a person like ‘Azad,’ a person from a country where he may well be imprisoned and even executed for being gay, all bets are off. For in such cases the Norwegian state’s respect for individuals takes a back seat – in a big way – to its respect for ‘different cultures.’ A gay person who happens to have been born into an Islamic culture cannot expect from the Norwegian state any deliverance from his culture’s values, even if those values condemn him to death.

The situation is actually even worse than I have already made it sound. Consider this: one of the five million residents of Norway is an Iraqi-born man named Mullah Krekar, who founded the terrorist group Ansar al-Islam. He is a brutal monster who has spoken out in support of Osama bin Laden and the actions of 9/11 and who is known to have ordered the torture of children. He came to Norway many years ago as an asylum seeker and was granted asylum. He now lives in Oslo, where he has a comfortable apartment, receives a generous subsidy from the government, and is able to move around the city freely without supervision. He lives with his wife, who works in a day-care center, and his children, who are being given as good an education as Norway can provide. There have been efforts to return him to Iraq to face justice for his manifold crimes. Yet Norwegian authorities have repeatedly refused to send him back on the grounds that he might be imprisoned or otherwise punished. In other words, Norwegian authorities are able to defend – are, indeed, zealous about defending – what they see as the individual ‘rights’ and ‘dignity’ of a terrorist, so long as those ‘rights’ and ‘dignity’ don’t appear to conflict with any cultural ‘norms’ or ‘values’ that they’re afraid of offending.

But when it comes to ‘Azad’?

‘Well, sorry, fella – this way to the plane.’

And, the Left has the unmitigated gall to accuse us of bigotry, racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and Islamophobia?

The same insanity that produces the belief that the only culture that can be condemned is that in the West is what leads morons like those in Spain's Pride Parade to ban a contingent of Israelis, who happen to come from the ONLY country in the Middle East where homosexuality is legal and women are treated as equals.